CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Ohio Supreme Court said Wednesday it will not give a second look to its November decision overturning a lower court’s order that would have given Cleveland death row inmate Anthony Apanovitch a new trial.

The state’s high court ruled last month that a Cuyahoga County judge was wrong to consider Apanovitch’s post-conviction petition to get evidence from his 1985 trial on rape and murder charges tested using new DNA technology.

The court on Wednesday denied a request from Apanovitch’s lawyers to reconsider that ruling.

Apanovitch has been on death row since he was convicted of the rape, burglary and murder of Mary Ann Flynn of Cleveland.

Flynn, a 33-year-old nurse, hired Apanovitch to paint her Archwood Drive home in the summer of 1984, according to records. He raped, beat and strangled her, prosecutors said. Flynn had previously told friends he had propositioned her and she was afraid of him.

Apanovitch lost three prior appeals of his conviction and death sentence before he filed another appeal to have DNA slides taken from Flynn’s mouth and vagina re-tested using technology that wasn’t available at his original trial. A 2000 test found there was not enough DNA evidence from her vagina to test, but that Apanovitch could not be ruled out as the source of the DNA in Flynn’s mouth. Apanovitch later argued in court that that test was unreliable.

In 2012, he filed a motion for post-conviction relief over the results of the 2000 test. At a 2015 hearing, an expert that Apanovitch’s legal team hired reviewed the results and said there was enough evidence there, and the results excluded Apanovicth as a match. The state’s expert again said there was not enough evidence to make a conclusion.

The judge overturned Apanovitch’s conviction, arguing that there was insufficient DNA evidence to sustain the conviction and that the state’s DNA expert did not expressly contradict the conclusions of Apanovitch’s expert. The court then ordered Apanovitch to undergo a new trial on the other charges, including aggravated murder and burglary, and released him on bond.

Prosecutors appealed the judge’s decision, arguing that Ohio law doesn’t give trial court judges the ability to consider post-conviction relief motions for new DNA testing when the original DNA tests were ordered by the state.

A majority of the Ohio Supreme Court justices agreed last month. They vacated the judge’s 2015 order and kicked the case back to the trial court to make a formal ruling.

O’Donnell made the same argument in a dissenting opinion of the majority’s Wednesday decision not to reconsider. He said he disagreed with the court’s original decision to remand the case back to the trial court. He would reconsider that aspect only, and find the trial court has no jurisdiction over the request and bring it to a close.